Inside the reshoots and retooling of Captain America: Brave New World – ‘We’ve made a damn good movie’

The creative team behind the Marvel film reveal what motivated changes to its Israeli character, fixing early tonal problems and more

What exactly is Captain America: Brave New World? The world has spent years wondering. Since it was first announced in 2022, the fourth Captain America film, and the first to star Anthony Mackie in the title role, has remained one of the most talked-about Marvel films since it was first announced – with fan speculation, public debate and high-profile rumours keeping anticipation high for the long-delayed Marvel Cinematic Universe film.

“I don't pay attention to it. There's a lot of excitement,” Mackie tells The National. “There are a lot of long-overdue thoughts and people who have ideas of what these characters should be.

“But for me, it’s just the excitement of being able to say that I did the best work I could on this movie as a producer and as an actor, and because of that, we have a damn good movie.”

Originally set to release in February last year, Brave New World has reportedly gone through multiple reshoots after poorly received early test screenings. Key scenes were cut and replaced, major characters were added (including Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito as a main villain) and others such as Ruth Bat-Seraph were reworked as the studio worked to fulfil the potential of Captain America’s new direction after former star Chris Evans exited the franchise, passing the mantle to on-screen partner Mackie, known as Sam Wilson in the series.

How many of those reports are true? Fans won’t know all until the film releases in cinemas across the Middle East next Thursday. But Marvel executives were following the rumours and debates from afar all along, deliberately staying quiet.

“It’s hard. There’s been a lot of stories. If we tried to comment on every story, we wouldn't be making any movies, we'd just be commenting,” says producer Nate Moore, who served as Marvel Studios’ vice president of production and development until January.

One of Marvel’s few public comments on a public debate came in 2022 when controversy swirled around the character Ruth Bat-Seraph, played by Israeli actress Shira Haas (Netflix’s Unorthodox).

The character first appeared in Marvel comic books in 1980 as an Israeli superhero and Mossad agent also known as Sabra. The announcement that Ruth would appear in Brave New World sparked protests in the global Palestinian community, with Marvel responding that the character would be “reworked”.

Last year, it appeared that the film's version may no longer be Israeli, as an official character biography for this film described her as a “former Black Widow” – a fictional group of female assassins in Marvel lore – with no mention of Israel, Mossad or the name Sabra. Those reported changes garnered further backlash in Israel.

Moore confirms that the character has indeed been reworked but has maintained the nationality of her comic book counterpart. “She's Israeli, but she's not Mossad. Now she works in the US government,” says Moore.

“What we thought was interesting was a lot of the characters in the film revolve around President Thaddeus Ross [Harrison Ford]. Ruth works within the government under Ross, so her perspective on that character and Sam's perspective sort of put them on a collision course. She's first-generation Israeli, but she works within the US government."

Were the changes the result of the backlash against the character? “No, not necessarily,” Moore responds. The changes were no different from the changes that all MCU characters go through when adapted from comics to film and television, where they often rework characters to fit their filmic storytelling which operates independently from the decades of comic book lore.

“We try to take the essence of a character but reinterpret it in a way that we find interesting," says Moore. "When we made the Black Widow movie, we realised there was an opportunity to connect that mythology to characters that we thought were interesting and maybe didn’t want to translate as one-to-one from publishing.

“The Ruth Bat-Seraph you meet in the film has very much, I would argue, the attitude of the character from publishing, but the backstory is different.”

The alterations to the character from the comic books are not limited to her former Mossad backstory being removed. “She’s no longer a mutant. She’s a part of the Red Room [from Black Widow]," he adds. "You want to make the best version of a character – be honest to the roots of the character without not necessarily doing what publishing did. We weren’t about to put her in a feather boa and have her throw diamond earrings at people [such as in the comic books] but we did like the attitude of the character.

“And to be quite honest, we’d been wanting to work with Shira Haas for a while. She’s so talented, she’s so unique, both in her look and her performance style. We thought this was the perfect marriage.”

According to the film’s director Julius Onah, “the Ruth of this movie is her own unique character that ended up becoming a great part of the tapestry of the paranoid thriller we wanted to make". He adds: "Shira just did a fantastic job bringing her to life.”

Onah also hints that Ruth may not remain an adversary of Captain America by the end of the film, praising Haas’s work in bringing the character’s complexity to life.

Onah says: “Shira is alive. [As Ruth] she gives this great performance as a great adversary for Sam, and that ends up being a really wonderful part of the journey that Sam takes over the course of this film, as he's dealing with adversaries who maybe become allies at certain points, and it's part of the twists and turns of the story."

The reports of reshoots are true, Moore confirms. Before additional photography, common parlance for reshoots in Hollywood, the film had potential tonal inconsistencies, leading the creative team to decide that the film needed to focus on its political thriller ambitions. The late addition of Giancarlo Esposito, an actor who has been in-demand as a villain since his turn as Gus in Breaking Bad, was one move made to shore up their vision.

“I think one of the challenges of making these sorts of movies is making sure your tone is consistent,” says Moore. “As we were making the film, we were really trying to find the perfect political thriller tone. And sometimes that means some of the stuff you shoot doesn’t quite work out in the way you intended.

“We knew we needed somebody like Giancarlo to help ground the tone even further into the world of the political thriller without it getting too heightened. The great thing about Giancarlo is that he can do stuff that is heightened, but you buy it. His character in The Mandalorian accomplished that. And I think he helped ground the tone of this movie in a way that really helped the movie writ large.”

Onah believes that some of the reports of the changes being made to the film were overblown. And while he agrees with Moore that adjusting the film’s "paranoid thriller" tone was integral during that process, it was also about perfecting theme.

“With every movie that you make, there's a natural evolutionary process. There's an iterative process that was no different for this," he says. "We iterate, we make discoveries. So that was a very natural part of the process. What was critical was making sure we had a real, true north. And thematically, this is a movie that's about empathy. It's about seeing the good in each other."

One of the biggest fan conversations of the decade is settled early in the movie, one that some speculated may never happen in a Marvel film. At the end of 2021’s Eternals, a cosmic being known as a Celestial dies leaving behind a massive stone corpse in the ocean. Because the event was never mentioned again after the film’s perceived underperformance critically and commercially, fans wondered if the events of Eternals would be ignored.

Moore, who produced both Eternals and Brave New World, says that Marvel deliberately waited until it served the story. In the film, it now serves as the birthplace of the element adamantium, an important substance in Marvel comics lore, particularly to characters such as Wolverine.

“It would have been wrong to just see it in the background and not really have it be a part of the storytelling," says Moore. "Adamantium carries such weight to the fan community and I think when they get to see the movie as a whole, they’ll see we’re making the best use of all of this."

Moore is also the producer of the next Black Panther film, which itself is subject to speculation that the title role, previously filled by the late Chadwick Boseman, will be recast.

He says: “There's so many rumours, none of them are true, but we're just going to hold our water and do our work and see what happens.”

Captain America: Brave New World opens in cinemas on Thursday across the Middle East